If you subscribe to the old adage of not speaking ill of the dead, then part one of ‘What Lies Tangled’ may not be for you. Its unusually long opening montage ends with the explosive death of one Professor Adam Capstone and almost before the good folk of the Oxfordshire Constabulary Pathology department have picked … >

Full marks to Angela Griffin as DS Maddox when she almost gets away with the line, “It says here under occupation he was a Practicing Alchemist” in the concluding part of ‘Magnum Opus’. Despite the absurdity of the comment she gives it the same lightness of touch that less convoluted police dramas would give to … >

There’s a moment about halfway through the first part of ‘Magnum Opus’, just before the second ad break in fact, where academic Wouter Eisler (played by Stephen Boxer with an extraordinary German accent) confirms that the picture found with the murder victim is an alchemical image. It represents, he explains, “Nigredo… the Blackening… the first … >

Perhaps it’s just a sign of cuts at ITV, but Lewis Season 9’s opening story, ‘One For Sorrow’, has a lower than average body-count. If you only caught the first quarter hour of Episode 1 last week, then you’ve seen all the corpses you’re going to see: the body in the well and the dead … >

The opening titles montage for ‘One for Sorrow’ ends with a dead animal stuffed and returned to the approximation of life, as a masked Magpie is placed by the grave of a squirrel. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to cynically claim this as an appropriate metaphor for Lewis, the improbable spin-off where a … >